A universal serial bus (USB) bus is an electronic network specification designed to allow a personal computer (PC) to be connected to multiple electronic devices such as keyboards, mice, personal data assistants (PDA's), cameras, music players and printers. The USB bus supports a host-peripheral relationship between connected devices as opposed to a peer-to-peer relationship. A typical USB electronic network 10 is shown in FIG. 1. The personal computer is always designated as the host device and the PC connected devices are always designated as the peripheral devices. Stated in terms of logical topology, USB networks exhibit a one-to-many relationship as opposed to a one-to-one relationship; the PC being “one” and the peripheral devices the “many”. Because the USB specification includes no more than one host in any USB connected network, current USB connectors and cables make no physical distinction between the host connectors and the peripheral connectors. Thus, an underlying assumption of USB networks is that the user of the network can easily distinguish between a host device and a peripheral device.
However, it is easy to select three common devices such as a PC, a PDA that is an intelligent portable computer, and a USB peripheral such as a printer in which the lack of gender of the USB connector can cause significant confusion. FIG. 2 illustrates the problem of one USB host 20 connected to a plurality of peripherals 22 and 24. As is shown in FIG. 2, suppose a user wishes to connect the PC 20 to the PDA 22. In this case, the PDA 22 is a USB peripheral and its USB signals must respond as a USB peripheral device 20 and be handled by USB peripheral software drivers and USB peripheral interface logic. Now suppose the user wishes to connect the PDA 22 to a USB printer. In this case the PDA 22 must be a USB host and its USB signals must respond as a USB 20 host and be handled by USB host software drivers and USB host interface logic. The inability of the PDA 22 to know how its USB signals should be treated is caused by the lack of host/peripheral gender of the USB connector and the basic one-to-many relationship of the USB network.
A new initiative called USB on-the-go (OTG) is an attempt to provide a solution to the problem of designating which end of the USB cable is a host or a peripheral. OTG does this by adding new software to the USB enumeration layer and defining a new USB fifth pin labeled VDIR to the four standard USB pin definitions of D+, D−, VCC and GND. The OTG effort does solve the USB connector gender problem but at the expense of added software, new types of cables and connectors, and a new pin definition VDIR. What is needed is a system and method to overcome the above-identified problems. The present invention addresses this need.